ryan, senate power brokers jim demint, jon kyl, tom coburn, and event organizer frank luntz. >> the room was filled. it was a who's who of ranking members who had at one point been committee chairmen or in the majority, who now wondered, out loud, whether they were in the permanent minority. >> the 44th president of these united states, barack obama. >> many of them had attended obama's inauguration. they had seen that breathtaking spectacle of a million and a half people on the mall. and it felt like a wholesale repudiation of the republican party. >> they walked into that dining room as depressed as i've seen any elected members of congress. they lost every senate seat they could lose. they lost all these house seats. the numbers were so great that they thought that they weren't coming back again, not for an election or two, but maybe a generation or two. >> narrator: as the night wore on, the talk turned to the future. >> three hours, some of the brightest minds in the republican party debated how to be relevant. >> the point i made was that we had to be prepared in the tradition